Bloodroot has always welcomed and respected everyone

As many of you know, Bloodroot has recently come under attack and is currently being trolled by a number of people in the transgender community and their supporters. We felt it was time to make an official statement. Because it seems whenever we try and explain what happened and our stance on this issue, it only serves to inspire more hatred, we will not be replying to comments.

Bloodroot and her owners are not transphobic – far from it! Bloodroot has always welcomed and respected everyone – especially people who might feel uncomfortable in a public space. Whether that be people from other countries, people of color, people of every type of sexuality, and yes, people who are transgender. Our long-time customers know that, many who are transgender, which is why they have been rallying to our defense.

One of our relatively new customers was enthusiastically telling us about a space in Massachusetts that catered to trans people and asked if we knew about it. We didn’t but since we are not trans, it wasn’t all that interesting to us personally and stated that for us, we prefer women only spaces. This comes from our history. When Bloodroot first started in the 70’s we were trying to create a space specifically safe for women, since there were so few places like that at the time. Of course even back then we were open and welcoming to everyone, not just women. This customer misunderstood what was really an off-hand comment and perceived that to mean that we were anti-trans. She then wrote a post slamming us. That post was seen and shared. Then some in the trans community – most of whom have never been to Bloodroot – started trolling us. We find it ironic that of all the many businesses that you probably buy things from, it’s hard to imagine any of them being as supportive of not only trans people, but all people who are “different” from societal norms as Bloodroot has been and continues to be. But Bloodroot, a Vegetarian (mostly vegan) Restaurant and Feminist bookstore, that has been in business for 40+ years and is owned and run by two lesbians aged 73 and 83, is the place they decide to attack. Women who through their activism as second wave feminists help pave the way for the rights and freedoms that the trans community today enjoy!

You couldn’t make it up. Not angry men making violent threats; not angry men carrying out violent actions; not racists; not fascists; not anti-abortion fanatics terrorizing women seeking abortions; not homophobes, not gay-bashers, not pussygrabbers, not rapists – but two feminist lesbians who have have run a vegetarian restaurant for 40 years. Yeah, kids, let’s attack them, because that will be easy and won’t take any courage!

Some of these “activists” are posting hostile reviews on Yelp, in hopes of harming Bloodroot’s business.

Imagine for a minute if hundreds of people who don’t know you started to attack you online, spewing lies about you that go against your core values, and trying to destroy you. Better yet, imagine them doing that to someone you love – your mother or grandmother for example. We understand this is a subject matter that many people are passionate about, but we feel this anger is misguided and misplaced.

Regardless of how you feel about Bloodroot’s stand on this, we will continue to be a welcoming space for all types of people, including those that are transgender, and treat everyone with respect. If you feel our explanation and response is inadequate for you, then you should not patronize us.

But, more urgently, you should also learn who your real enemies are. They are not Bloodroot and they are not Selma and Noel.

I don’t know…”bloodroot” is sort of a gross name, so it’s hard to have much sympathy for them.

In my life I’ve been on the right and the left at various times as my political thinking shifted and as American politics changed, ultimately ending up on the left. So I’ve seen how both sides operate. What struck me about the left was how much they eat their own. The worst was 2010, where the left pitched a fit and decided to stay home “to teach the Democrats a lesson”. Yeah, great idea. Republicans took over Congress and state legislatures and, since it was a census year, they gerrymandered the districts to give themselves a huge political advantage for the next decade.

And then in 2016 you had liberals staying at home or voting for Jill Stein because they didn’t like Hillary. Really? Didn’t like her more than Trump at least? So now we’re stuck with Trump.

And then on the local level it’s one more-virtuous-than-thou display after another. How is “TERF” even a thing? Someone actually invented a category where people they admit are “radical feminists” have to be tagged with a way in which they fall short of leftist purity?

So no surprise Bloodroot is getting targeted. If transwomen aren’t immediately acknowledged as the best and most legitimate women of all, then there’s going to be hell to pay.

Anyone tried any of their recipes? I’m suddenly quite tempted to purchase a few new cookbooks! I’m not vegan but just generally have a harder time making good vegetable dishes than meat dishes so if they’re not too complicated I certa8 yo wouldn’t mind giving them a whirl

(Also going to be looking for Sanguineria plants for my garden this spring, planted well out of reach of the taste-first-ask-questions-later dog, though! The tangents this blog sometimes sends me on… )

I was curious about the level of vitriol directed at them, so I searched for these yelp reviews… and noticed that their site had a ‘this site may be hacked’ note on the google results page. I wonder if this is also a product of the campaign against them, to tarnish their reputation or simply to discourage web visits?

The start of this seems to be a Facebook user Pinky Shear who wrote a post dated December 28th that said:

tw: transphobic TERF commentary

This experience happened to a valued friend. The restaurant is now trying to “rally there troops” and flooding their page with 5 star reviews in an attempt to bury my friend’s transphobic experience .

That’s ok. We have our own troops. Please share.

I transcribed the alleged story below to document it and make it searchable. I added emphasis to the alleged quote of Selma Miriam because I can only believe the first sentence is a distortion and the other sentences are unbelievable lies:

So just want to let folks know that I will no longer be going to Bloodroot ever again, and if you support me and/or other trans people, I advise you to do the same. Bloodroot, for those who don’t know, is a feminist, lesbian, vegan/vegetarian restaurant and feminist bookstore in Bridgeport, CT. This place seems rad as hell but they are HORRIFYING VIOLENT TERFS (trans exclusionary radical feminists). I’ve gone to Bloodroot two times, and each time, I connected with the owners Noel and Selma and chated long after I was done eating. Yesterday I was having lunch with a friend and was chating with them, connecting about *the queen* Audre Lorde, whom they knew personally, and who visited their restaurant many times (which is honestly SO confusing???). They asked me what my dream is and I told them I have dreams of staring a queer and trans intentional community and sanctuary. Immediately Selma and Noel looked at one another and selma said, “we strongly believe in supporting only women born women here. we are disgusted by men who think they can put on dresses and nail polish and pump themselves with chemicals and say they are women. they just aren’t. and we will never support them.” In this moment I felt so uncomfortable and afraid that I sincerely couldn’t even speak. I had so many things to say, but felt frozen. The only thing I feel I can do Is refuse to support them and encourage others to do the same.

Please tag friends and share widley!!! It is unacceptable that they are so widley well known as and considered to be feminist and radical business.

TRANS PEOPLE ARE SACRED and TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. Lets not forget that trans women are brutalized every fucking day in this world. Girl, if your feminism aint intersectional and trans-inclusive, it aint shit.

About the left eating the left… Do you suppose it’s about directing anger at just that audience that may actually care about one’s values, enough that they could be expected possibly to come around? No one on the right is going to care about trans-exclusion of any variety for any reason – to them, it’s all natural and good. On the left, they can expect at least some pull toward inclusion and some willingness to accept some reading of “trans women are women!”.

It would also account for the occasional righter-than-thou versus some-sense-of-pragmatism fights on the right. What is left as a question would be why it seems more prevalent on the left – do we have more principles that it’s harder to reconcile?

Its beyond left/right. We have a culture where righteous indignation is the only motivating emotion. And it can be generated at will, in almost any direction. Look at comments on Yahoo ‘news’ blurbs ‘splaining how liberal child rearing causes mass shootings. Or watch the anti-Israel crowd hijack every topic, no matter how distant.

Specific policies and ideologies aside, I’d rather be part of a group that held their own accountable to the point where that became somewhat self-destructive, than be part of a group that refused to hold their own accountable to the point where they’d rally behind paedophiles.

Lets not forget that trans women are brutalized every fucking day in this world

Take out the trans, and that statement is still true. That’s what the problem with the anti-TERF worldview is – they think only trans-women are brutalized.

I’d rather be part of a group that held their own accountable to the point where that became somewhat self-destructive, than be part of a group that refused to hold their own accountable to the point where they’d rally behind paedophiles

On the surface, that sounds okay, but it depends on what standard you are holding people accountable to; purity is not desirable. It’s really just like the over-valuation of virginity on the right – purity is purity, and requiring purity is not just a self-destructive standard, it is an other destructive standard, and often becomes self-defeating. Especially when the people they are destroying are good people who give a shit about other people. You have to figure out what are the values people should be held accountable to, and not just make it up as you go along, and not enter immediately into attack mode. If you believe in your heart of hearts that there is something wrong with the “TERFs”, you should attempt to speak with them, and maybe listen to them, and see if you can reach some place where either they agree with you or you realize they are not so horrible.

Somewhere there must be a viable choice between absolute purity and accountability that destroys others and the support of paedophiles.

To a large extent I was anti-gamergate because I viewed the way the gamergater’s engaged in disagreement despicable. I had no particular fondness for Anita Sarkeesian, and so far as I could see what she was saying was standard boilerplate, it wasn’t anything particularly new or even interesting.

But when it came to the degree of death and rape threats, the stalking, the bomb threats at events she was speaking at?

That had to be opposed, or freedom of speech means nothing.

But I’ve noticed that same shit coming from the left. What happened to Ophelia Benson at FTB was straight up the sort of sexual harassment that the left is supposed to oppose, but because the target was deemed a “TERF” suddenly it was okay.

Suddenly the left became not about opposing that sort of behaviour, but opposing it being done to the wrong people, becoming about not punching down, rather than not committing assault. One of the things I’ve sort of respected about Benson throughout my time reading this blog is – when people were doing things like calling Anne Coulter “MAnne Coulter”, Benson objected.

It wasn’t a matter of there being no bad tactics, only bad targets, it was a matter of there being basic principles – basic things which we don’t do. Social justice as a cause to be fought for, not a battering ram against one’s opponents, or a list of acceptable targets for unacceptable behaviour.

And that is something that is missing from so much of this. It isn’t so much a matter of “Oh they’re not your enemies” – would it matter if they were? Would it be suddenly acceptable to engage in lying, or trying to drive them out of business?

I don’t think so. Part of the fight is for a basic standard of decency, even towards someone who is “the enemy” – because we see what happens when that standard isn’t there. First they punch a Nazi, then they punch a woman in her sixties for using the wrong definition of gender, eventually they get around to you.

Iknklast #12, Bruce #13, thanks, that does shed more nuance on the subject.

Obviously, it’d be nice to live in a world where we don’t have either extreme, and our systems don’t fail, but this world is not that one. Thinking about it a bit more deeply, I suspect the level to which we hold people accountable is similar in many ways to the justice system in general, in that it can fail in being too harsh (eating our own, jailing the innocent) and in being too innocent (standing behind awful people, letting the guilty go free). Moreover, we can probably never stop it failing at either end – no matter how harsh we are, some bad people will get away with crap sometimes, and no matter how lenient we are, some good people will get crapped on sometimes. And the more we bias the system in one direction, the worse the failures will be at the other end.

So I suppose the question is, if we have to pick a bias, knowing that that will lead to failures at the other extreme, do we want to be harsh, or lenient?

I guess that question starts to be fed by ideology. Do want to crack down with law and order? Or be compassionate, and give people the benefit of the doubt? After all, assholes are probably going to asshole more than once, and give you plenty more chances to catch them in the future. Put in those terms, about the possible failure modes, and the ones I’d rather see more of, I think I might change my mind here.

Holding one’s own accountable is in general an excellent principle. Republicans who refuse to hold Trump accountable for anything make a useful (albeit obvious) illustration of why. But that’s in general; in particular, sometimes it’s not such a great principle. The main reason I ended up leaving FTB was because they were trying to tell me what to think, even what to “believe”…and, indeed, what to discuss, analyze, question, doubt. They were trying to enforce a dogma, and a very feeble and rickety dogma at that.

Of course there was also all that venom and malice, which didn’t help!

This is quite pertinent to an article I happened to read yesterday. It suggests that instead of talking about “virtue signalling”, a more appropriate term would be “piety contests”. The idea is that in a piety contest dynamic, a single value is raised in importance above all else, leading to absurdities and abandonment of other values.

Imagine a community in which competing statements are judged, not on the basis of their accuracy or coherence, but by the degree to which they reflect some sacred value. Furthermore, there’s some sort of punishment for those who find themselves on the losing end of the contest. The result is that the sacred value in question ends up trumping all other values such as workability, or truth, or coherence, or humanity.

The writer does seem to have some right wing ideas (taking a swipe at the left for views regarding unequality of outcomes between different populations). He also goes on quite a bit about virtue signalling being an important part of an individual’s moral development, but I’m not convinced by that argument and consider that tangent completely irrelevant to the concept of a piety contest dynamic. Beyond these flaws though, the basic idea seems quite valid, and a rather good description of what’s going on in pile-ons like this.

I should probably also mention, that as I was reading, I was mentally betting that I’ll get to apply this idea to a real life example sooner rather than later.

I suspect that it also has something to do with the human need for consistency. When people who stand very far from us ideologically disagree with us, it’s fairly easy to shrug off and rarely causes much cognitive dissonance. The real threat to world view and self-image comes from the people who mostly share our views, but not across the board, because that suggests that our own conclusions are not the only ones that can be arrived at, even by people who aren’t clueless enough to support the Right.

Lets not forget that trans women are brutalized every fucking day in this world

This is true, and makes it all the more disgusting that the Twitter brigadiers use this violence and degradation (essentially exclusively on the part of men, and in all cases enforcing patriarchal standards of gender norms) as an excuse to target and harass women.

About 15 years ago I went there for the reception dinner of a friend’s small wedding. The food was delicious, and the room had a powerful feel to it – that the weight of a lot of history was in the place.

In particular the wedding cake was a vegan chocolate recipe based on sourdough that was a cut above the usual vegan cake, and we ended up buying their cookbooks. Sadly, being unadventurous cooks we haven’t gone much beyond that cake, but we do make that recipe regularly.

Immediately Selma and Noel looked at one another and selma said, “we strongly believe in supporting only women born women here. we are disgusted by men who think they can put on dresses and nail polish and pump themselves with chemicals and say they are women. they just aren’t. and we will never support them.”

…I now find that this sounds sort of weaselly:

One of our relatively new customers was enthusiastically telling us about a space in Massachusetts that catered to trans people and asked if we knew about it. We didn’t but since we are not trans, it wasn’t all that interesting to us personally and stated that for us, we prefer women only spaces. This comes from our history. When Bloodroot first started in the 70’s we were trying to create a space specifically safe for women, since there were so few places like that at the time. Of course even back then we were open and welcoming to everyone, not just women. This customer misunderstood what was really an off-hand comment and perceived that to mean that we were anti-trans.

I’m not trans, but if a trans person were enthusiastically telling about a great place for trans people, I certainly wouldn’t inform them that didn’t interest me. That seems pretty rude. And I also wouldn’t make a couple of comments about how I preferred places for women. That could easily be seen as an implication that trans women aren’t women. (Note that I’m just talking about accepting trans women as women, not getting into the “are they women PERIOD – yes or no?!?!” debate.)

The “off-hand comment” bit also seems like a possible veiled admission they said something worse than they’re letting on.

So…if they did say something obnoxious, then what should happen? Sure, there are bigger targets, but people wouldn’t be cool with someone who was a big supporter of progressive causes but casually mentioned they didn’t care for gay people.

Axxyaan – and there is the related phenomenon where people are pushing their audience to be excited, and insisting that they show the same enthusiasm. I’ve had that experience, and have eventually annoyed some people by getting exasperated enough by being told “oh, you must” or “you’d love it!” or something else about needing to go, to gush, or just to be reverential, and told them what I thought.

Also, if you think about it, maybe there’s something a little rude about a trans woman (assuming it was a trans woman who was telling Selma and Noel about the trans inclusive place) enthusiastically telling two feminist women in their restaurant about a space in Massachusetts that catered to trans people, as if hinting that the two feminist women have kind of fallen short in that department. Maybe Pinky Shears was hinting or even saying that Selma and Noel should be “centering trans women”…or perhaps “centering trans folk”…or, even worse, “trans Folx.” Maybe PS was subtly or not so subtly hinting to Selma and Noel that they’re not all that cool and they’re kinda behind the times and their feminist ideas are so last millennium and now just stand for cis privilege.

Who knows. I don’t. I find Pinky Shears’s version flatly non-credible on its face, but I don’t know. But it does remind me of that time one of the Pharyngula mob commented on a post of mine [at FTB] about an attack on abortion rights to ask if we couldn’t please stop talking about abortion as a women’s issue. It reminds of that whole “Yeah never mind feminism because women have cis privilege, the cunts” line.